Is there a "Shadows & Highlights" filter avialable like on Photoshop CS5? HDR look.

S

skital

Well-known member
Is there a "Shadows & Highlights" filter avialable like on Photoshop CS5? HDR look.

I've been playing around with Photoshop CS5 with T2i and GH1 screenshots using the Shadows and Highlights filter first before doing anything else, and what has surprised me is how much of a high dynamic range film look I can achieve with it. It really takes away from the video look and adds film like tonality to the images. I shape the gamma curve after and then adjust other settings.

I am unable to match this tonality change with any shaping of the gamma curve. I basically really want to do this for video. Does Vegas or Premiere Pro CS5 have this feature or a plug in that does?

Thanks!
 
I use Vegas Pro - secondary color correction with Boost mids for something a bit similar.
 
Rikki said:
I use Vegas Pro - secondary color correction with Boost mids for something a bit similar.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I'm able to get some nice looks using that and curves just as always, but so far nothing I do with the curves, color corrector (primary or secondary) achieves the HDR film like type of tonality that using the Shadows & Highlights filter first before Curves achieves with ease. Very frustrating. i've tried everything. Even shaping individual color curves. The S&H filter is pretty awesome.

S&H seems to flatten the image in a different way than simply lowering the contrast, adjust the levels or using the curves. It changes the whole tonality in a way that I can't do using any other feature. Hm.
 
I agree, the Photoshop S&H filter is awesome. I've used it to salvage many shadow details that would have otherwise been lost. Careful use of S&H is much simpler than taking multiple exposures & combining them in post. It is a shame Vegas does not have a similar function. Seems to me it would not be difficult to do.
 
Photoshop manages it though as most images you attack are high quality, not long GOP compressed frames with chroma sub sampling.
 
Excellent point - I'm sure processing 24fps (or whatever it is) of compressed/encoded video is much different from a single fixed image. But even so, Vegas has lots of pretty fancy filters in it now, so they must know how to do this sort of thing. I use brightness/contrast all the time and my guess is shadows/highlights would just be a variation on this.
 
Yes, but take a frame grab from a video you've shot and pull it into Photoshop and run shadows/highlights and watch the image come apart as it doesnt hold as much data as a stand alone image taken from a camera etc
 
That's an interesting idea Rikki. I'll have to try that. To tell the truth I've never made a frame grab from Vegas. But I wonder - doesn't the grab get saved as a JPG file? And if so, what is the "missing" data? My understanding is that although AVCHD video input to Vegas is highly compressed the Vegas codecs that create the output JPG are able to create the full set of JPG image pixels that end up being saved as the grabbed image file. Wouldn't Photoshop see the resultant grabbed image the same as any other JPG, just with far fewer pixels than a corresponding still photo?

Maybe that's the real issue - my GH1's 16x9 aspect ratio JPGs have between 4 - 5 MB of data each (~12 megapixel image) whereas Vegas is going to output a 1920x1080 (~2MB) image. That is a lot fewer pixels to work with for sure.
 
FYI You can output either JPEG or PNG from the video preview window (diskette icon), or can simply use the copy to clipboard button next to it to paste into something like photoshop or MS Paint.
 
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